Ordo Dracul
The Ordo Dracul The Defiant "I will spit in the eye of God, and he will allow it." “The most exciting part about a Dragon’s Nest is that you never quite know what you’re going to get,” I say. Richard the Could-Be-King looks at me, one eyebrow raised under his floppy fringe. His smirk — his usual expression — falters. I sort of fancy Richard, but I know he’s bad news. He’s new, see. A bit erratic. All, oh can I have a mystical name now? and when do I get to learn the good stuff? A bit too keen. And a bit too keen to tell people all about it. So Mr. Kogaion says, it’s time to take him to a Dragon’s Nest. See what he’s made of. “Have you gone wrong, Frances?” he says. “You’re not impressed. I can tell.” “This is a leisure center.” Rich, Rich, you are so very wet behind your ears. Yes, this is a leisure center. This is, in fact, the leisure center that the County Council had to shut down because of the concrete cancer on every outer wall, and the 55-year-old woman who got killed when a bit of the ceiling spontaneously fell on her head during her second go on the rowing machine. If only she had known when to stop. So no lights are here, and in the three months since they shut the leisure center — with no small amount of controversy, and an election coming too — no one has moved the gym equipment. It’s just sitting here, rotting. Some of the metal is rusted around the edges. It’s covered with a layer of dust that stinks of age. It looks like it should have been shut for years. Rich doesn’t seem to have any idea how significant this is. Presumably he hasn’t seen past his stupid floppy fringe. But no spiders. No bugs. Nothing living. I run my finger over the rail of a walking machine, leaving a furrow in the dust, which sticks to my finger. As I disengage, a bolt of static electricity zaps my hand. I yelp, and hope Rich didn’t hear me. Probably not. Ventrue. Practically deaf. As I look around, trying to look like that wasn’t an accident, I spot a thing. “Hah,” I say, still sucking my finger. “See that?” “No.” I forgot. He can’t see so well in the dark as I can. I turn on my torch and wave it towards the wall. Graffiti. Four slanted lines under a kind of upside-down U-shape, spray-painted on. We approach it, slowly. “Do you know what that is?” says Rich. “It’s a sign on the wall,” I say. “It’s a signal.” “Well, yes.” He is impatient. “For who?” “I don’t know,” I say. “But can’t you feel it? Can’t you feel the power in the air? The electricity? The energies? The hairs on the back of your neck, standing up. Then way your feet are moving through it like…like…jam.” “Jam.” I was doing so well. He’s just staring at me, standing in the middle of the decaying gym equipment with these amazing energies all around him and he doesn’t have a clue. “I don’t even know what we’re doing here,” he says. “Well, it’s kind of, you know, salutary to find out what exactly is waiting in here. I mean, I’ve got a clue, but, well, we need to flush the little chap out. Let him do his thing. Then we can figure out if we can use the place.” I can hear the sound of footsteps. Right above us. The floor above us. I can smell ozone and dry rot. I can almost see him, or I can see hints of him, anyway, the way that even month-old cobwebs crumble as he passes, the crackles of something lethaland somehow stale. They don’t call me the Queen of Eyes for nothing. In point of fact, they don’t call me the Queen of Eyes. But that’s who I am. “Wait a minute. What do you mean, flush him—” Rich doesn’t get to finish his sentence. I’m gone, poof, into the shadows, out of sight, and that always dodgy ceiling collapses onto him, someone huge and big and flashing with electricity and all these huge fists like bricks, all studded with bits of metal and rivets. Dead flesh that isn’t dead. Incoherent roars. The sound of tearing. It’s not nice to watch, but it’s what I’m here for. Rich gives it his best shot, bless him. And we’ve got the present owner out to play and settled the question of whether the Could-Be-King…well, actually Could Be. Hard luck, Rich. You want to join the Ordo Dracul because You want to cheat death — properly. You think you can be better. When you were alive, you yearned to be a vampire. You believe that being a vampire could be wonderful, and you want to find a way. You want to become alive again, but so much better than human. You find the occult world terrifying. You are afraid of what you might become. The big picture The dead scientist who experiments on humans, werewolves, and fairies in a sterile white laboratory. The occult archaeologist who rifles through the tombs of the terrifying beasts of old. The chillingly plausible preacher who leads his disciples into self-mutilation and surgical alteration. The robed cultists whose rituals depend on the sacrifice of angels. These are the Ordo Dracul. They are the Order of the Dragon, the children of Dracula himself. They adopt mystical names, play at arcane ceremonies, forge underground fighting rings, start cults, explore places they should not go. The Ordo Dracul knows more about the hidden world than perhaps any other group of vampires. If they do not always share the things they’ve learned with each other, they still have a source of knowledge and experience that ensures the other covenants keep them around. Like the Lancea et Sanctum, the self-styled Dragons seek knowledge through seeking out artifacts and text. But while the Sanctified seem to collect it to keep it or destroy it, the Dragons, instructed by their cold leaders, whom they call the Kogaions, collect it to learn about it and make use of it, no matter how dangerous it might be. It has to have a purpose. Nothing the Ordo Dracul learns is without a use. Everything works towards tightly defined goals: the betterment of the vampire condition, the amassing of an individual’s supernatural power, and the defeat of God. Like the Sanctified, the vampires of the Ordo Dracul teach their neonates that God ordained that they be vampires; but in their eyes, this makes God an enemy. They spit in the face of God’s injustice. God is senile, they say. God is mad. God must be torn down from his throne. They would fight angels themselves to weaken God’s hold on the Damned. The goal is life, but not simple human life: the life of an immortal, unleashed by the curse of mortality and the curse of undeath alike. The spiritual disciplines taught by the Order, the Coils, don’t quite get a vampire there, but it’s a start. And a start on the road to transcendence is enough. But what then? What happens when the vampires shed their curse and have only power? Will the hunger also be gone? The Order of the Dragon doesn’t have the answer to that, yet. But they yearn to find out, and when they do they will learn what they can, and they will look up to Heaven and they will spit in the face of God. Where we came from Dracula. He was the first Kogaion of the Dragons, the attributed writer of the Rites of the Dragon, that troublesome hymn to undeath that still circulates tonight among the Kindred. The Ordo Dracul, without ever gaining his permission, took his name. But then, asking permission was the very opposite of Dracula’s lessons. No vampire even knows what he was really like. All that is known, outside of the Rites, is that he was once Vlad Tepes, the Impaler, hero of Wallachia. In the closing nights of 1476, as his assassins closed in on him at the end of his third reign, he cursed them and cursed God, and God heard him. That night he became a vampire with no sire, the most famous of all the revenants. Among the Kindred, knowledge is found; and it was a vampire of the Ordo Dracul who found out that Dracula wasn’t the first to be so singularly Cursed, and wasn’t the last. But then, that’s the modus operandi of the Dragons: They find these things. If the Dragons are a threat to the other covenants, it is precisely because they continually reveal truths about the vampires. The Order uses these truths as weapons — they always have. But at the same time, in threatening the truths to which the more traditional covenants have long held, they make the Kindred strong. And they always have. Right from the beginning, the vampires of the Ordo Dracul have sought to be better monsters: more efficient, more powerful, colder, harder, and so much more intelligent. Our practices We vampires of the Ordo Dracul seek to improve ourselves, and the Coils of the Dragons are just one way we do so. Some say we unearth things that perhaps should not have been discovered. We say that the only discoveries we should not pursue are those that, when unleashed, turn and destroy the creator — but there’s really no way to know what will happen until we get started, hmm? (Not long ago, a Sanctified Bishop in London blamed the Dragons for bringing back the Owls. The Kogaion of London smiled and did not deny it.) A Kogaion of the Dragons is oddly secure in her place. While all the other covenants are wracked with infighting, the Dragons seem almost to avoid the role of Kogaion, pushing our most senior members into the role almost as some sort of punishment, Vampires of other covenants find this hugely confusing. But even the most enthusiastic Kogaion finds that the secrets she must learn to hold the position are burdensome, and eventually, maddening. The existence of a neonate in the Dragons is a constant test. Elders send them to find artifacts and texts before the Sanctified squirrel them away. Sometimes they are sent into dangerous situations just to see how they handle pressure. It’s often the neonates who are the first to enter what we call “Dragon’s Nests,” the places of power that exist in dizzying variety. Werewolves, magicians, fairies, ghosts, spirits, angels, and other creatures all create spaces, deliberately or accidentally, where the supernatural powers of the world concentrate themselves. We can’t always get anything out of these places, but when we find one, we nearly always try. Sometimes, if a neonate has been disappointing, a trip to a nest can be the final data point in an analysis as to whether he is even worth keeping. All this means that while we Dragons don’t know a vast amount about other supernatural forces, we know more than most of the other covenants. More than knowing, though, the Order acts on its knowledge. We continually put ourselves in dangerous situations, because if our existence is worth bettering, it is worth risking. Nicknames: The Defiant (within the covenant), the Dragons, the Order (or Order of the Dragon, outside of the covenant) Concepts Venturesome archaeologist, charismatic occult study group leader, underground bare-knuckle boxer, cold-fish doctor, quirky writer, failed suicide When we are in power Of the five major covenants, the Ordo Dracul is the one least likely to hold power over a Kindred domain. In the few places where the leaders of the Kindred are Dragons, the Kogaion is usually pretty laissez-faire about the intrigues of the other covenants. It’s not that we are weak, it is that these things are of little concern to us, which often infuriates rivals. A Dragon prince (or Voivode, if he wants to be traditional about it) is often the strongest, and most magically adept of all the vampires in the domain, and quite capable of dealing with assassins and enemies without any help. He just doesn’t care about why he has enemies and assassins. This can drive the leaders of the other covenants insane with impotent rage and make a Dragon’s domain a potential flash point. When we are in trouble Persecuted Dragons seem almost invigorated by the experience. We are made stronger by everything we experience: We are improved. Push a Dragon down and soon you will be devoured.